[An Nahar] A sniper killed an Al-Jazeera... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula, as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS...news hound in southern Syria on Friday, the pan-Arab television network said, in the second such shooting of a journalist in two days in the conflict-swept country.

The killings take the corpse count of news hounds who have died in Syria's 22-month conflict to at least 20, according to a count by Agence La Belle France Presse and Gay Paree-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, or RSF.

"Mohammed Hourani was rubbed out by a regime sniper in Basra al-Harir in the province of Daraa, while he was covering the festivities there," Al-Jazeera said in a statement.

The Qatar-based satellite news channel confirmed Hourani's killing, and described the 33-year-old Syrian journalist as "courageous and accurate" in his reporting.